Following the announcement of NVIDIA's new mobile chip, the Tegra K1, during CES last Sunday, many have speculated as to what it means for mobile processors. According to early benchmark tests conducted by Tom's Hardware, the Tegra K1 outperforms similar chipsets made by Apple and Qualcomm in almost every category.

The Tegra K1, which sports a quad-core, 32-bit ARM Cortex A15 CPU clocking in at 2.3 GHz, as well as a 192-core GPU with Kepler architecture, was tested at CES 2014 in comparison to two other mobile processors: the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800, and the Apple A7, which powers the iPhone 5S. NVIDIA's processor managed to outperform both chipsets in almost every category. Above is its comparison in terms of graphics and physics, wherein the Tegra K1 scored a 24,971 (graphics), relative to the Snapdragon 800's score of 17,995 and the Apple A7's score of 18,995.

The second benchmark tested the Tegra K1's ability to maintain a framerate while rendering a scene including multiple effects, physics and lighting. According to the graph, the Tegra K1 performed slightly below average onscreen, but ranked nearly twice as high as Apple offscreen.

While it's still very early to tell, it looks like NVIDIA's new mobile chip is shaping up to be a big competitor in the mobile world -- potentially even elevating the platform to the performance level of PC and console systems.